Video: The elements of a report

We're going to jump in to creating reports in just a second, but I have got one key concept to cover first so that when we do jump in, things will make a lot more sense. See, every report you make in Reporting Services will require that you provide three elements, three things, three distinct kinds of information in order, that I'll describe as the where, the what, and the how. Where is the data for this report, what is the data for this report, and how should it be presented? And we need to describe each of these three pieces individually.

Discover how to create, manage, and deliver interactive reports—not just to print, but to dynamically explore enterprise-level data—with Reporting Services in SQL Server. In this course, author Simon Allardice concentrates on using Report Builder to build and format reports from a variety of data sources, but also shows how to perform basic administration tasks such as granting user access and organizing reports in the Report Manager. Plus, learn how to add interactive sorting and filtering functionality to your reports, and create column and pie charts to better express your data.

Note: These tutorials are applicable to both the 2008 and 2012 versions of SQL Server.

The elements of a report

We're going to jump in to creating reports in just a second, but I have gotone key concept to cover first so that when we do jump in, things will make a lot more sense.See, every report you make in Reporting Services will require that you providethree elements, three things, three distinct kinds of information in order, thatI'll describe as the where, the what, and the how.Where is the data for this report, what is the data for this report, and howshould it be presented?And we need to describe each of these three pieces individually.

Without all three, you don't have a report.So first, where is it?Where is the data that you're interested in, and how do you connect to it?Literally what machine is it on? What's it called?Because Reporting Services is not restricted to only creating reports from dataon the same physical SQL Server machine. Sure, that it is very common, but it cantalk to other SQL Server machines, whether they are across the room or acrossthe world. They can talk to other database systems.They can talk to SharePoint lists.

They can talk to XML files.So if we want to create a report and, say, base it on data in a SQL Serverdatabase, we begin by providing the name of the server, the actual name ofthat machine, then the name of the database on that server, because there'stypically multiple different databases. And because just naming a database isnot going to get you inside it--all databases are typically secured, so wewill also need to provide some kind of authentication details so thatdatabase will actually let us in.

So this is your report's source of data, your data source, and that is the term that we use.We are defining the data source.So if that's the where, the next step is what? What is your data?Now, you might think you just provided this, but you didn't.Our data source is just us pointing to the database we are interested in,saying where it is and how we connect to it.But we don't want the entire contents of that database just dumped out on a report.So in the what step we specify the data that we want.

What is that data exactly? What tables, what rows, what columns, in what order,with what conditions?This is the subset of the data that we are interested in, and this is called the data set.And finally, once we've defined the where-- the data source--and the what--the dataset--we can define the how.How should this be presented? What does it look like? What is the layout?So from purely presentational choices like what fonts and what colors we areusing, to more structural choices, because the same data could be shownmany different ways.

So is it just raw text and numbers, or will we generate charts and graphs fromthis data? Will we allow viewers to interact with the report and re-sort it andmove through pages of it?So everything that we are going to do is going to fall into the where--the datasource--the what--the data set--and the how--our report layout--and it's differentkinds of thought process that we need for each step.So next, let's see an example.

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